Morning music
Saturday quiz
Well, this week only 4/10, but thereby again beating political journalist John Rentoul, who scored 3/10. I only knew the answers to questions 1, 4, 5, and 8.
As to the other questions, I only remembered the answers to questions 2, 3, and 9 once I looked up the information, guessed wrong on question 10, and had (and still have) no idea as to questions 6 and 7.
Tweets seen
My assessment from several years ago (“Trump is a loudly-squawking parrot in a gilded cage, surrounded by a phalanx of Jews“) turns out to have been completely accurate.
Applied to a general election, would translate to a Commons with about 323 Reform UK MPs (3 short of a majority), 87 Greens (weak official Opposition), 81 LibDems, 50 Cons, 45 SNP, and 37 Lab [etc].
It now goes without saying that, on those figures, Starmer-stein would lose his own seat.
Almost no-one these days uses the word “decimate” properly, and that Schofield scribbler is no exception.
Import such populations, import their ways of doing politics and/or business and/or crime. If you want to get rid of those behaviours, you pretty much have to get rid of the populations.
At this point, Starmer the Nation-Harmer morphs from being a would-be “world leader”, and pathetic would-be bully-dictator, into a Norman Wisdom imposter-syndrome figure, the lowly [fill in his job] who is mistaken for a political leader and then makes all sorts of odd decisions.
As for Gordon Brown, a near-lunatic married to a wife who always struck me, when I saw the couple on TV at public occasions, as akin to a psychiatric nurse in charge of a patient having an outing.
Ha ha. System mouthpiece Andrew Marr once again comes out to bat for Blair-Brown Labour.
Apart from puffing Gordon Brown’s premiership, 16+ years on, Marr says as little as possible about “Harriet Harperson” and nothing at all about the real concerns of millions of British people. His list of issues mentioned did not even include mass immigration, which is tearing this country apart.
Actually, if you want to use the hackneyed “traitor” gibe, there are few better candidates:
An enemy of the British people.
Incidentally:
“Regarding his political affiliations, he was formerly a Maoist and a member of the Socialist Campaign for a Labour Victory, a left-wing pressure group founded by Labour Party members, now known as the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty. His interest in Mao Zedong began as early as age eleven, when he gave fellow Craigflower School students copies of the Little Red Book that he had requested and received from the Chinese embassy.[12][13] His affinity for Maoism continued into his time at Cambridge, where Marr says he was a “raving leftie” who acquired the nickname “Red Andy“.
[Wikipedia]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Marr
A Maoist as a university student, so as late as 1978 (Mao died in 1976).
Does not say much for Marr’s political judgment.
It is one thing to be a “Maoist” aged 11, as Marr was, or thought he was —I too had two “little red books” (Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, and On People’s War by Lin Piao) given to me when I was a similar age, in my case in 1967 in Australia— but it is surely different when the person is a hopefully more mature 18-21, and in 1977 or even 1979. Incredible…
[“In normal circumstances, Keir Starmer’s appointment of Gordon Brown as his special envoy on global finance and Harriet Harman as his adviser on women and girls would be seen by Labour MPs as sensible. Tapping the wisdom of the party’s elders to solve important problems would be viewed as competent if dull technocratic government.
However these are not normal circumstances for the Prime Minister. His MPs see him as responsible for yesterday’s electoral catastrophe. He indeed has insisted he does take full responsibility.
And that is why the appointments are in fact incendiary. Because they are seen as – at best – irrelevant to the crisis faced by the government, and for many MPs and ministers they are provocative, an insult, a manifestation – in the words of one minister – “that he simply doesn’t get it.”
This is what one senior and influential member of the government told me:
“The Harriet and Gordon thing and his Guardian article [in which he said the government should neither move left or right] has annoyed Labour MPs even more. It’s tone deaf. I think people give him until Monday to actually show he gets it or he’s done.”
To be clear, this minister would often try and defend the PM. Not any more. And that’s not altogether surprising, given that few Reform voters are likely to say “I was thinking of voting for Nigel Farage but I’ve changed my mind now that Keir has tapped Gordon to create an international off-balance-sheet finance facility for defence spending.”
Another minister told me that the preference of MPs and Labour’s members would be for Starmer to stay and turn around the performance of the government, but they were increasingly doubtful he was capable of doing this.
This minister’s mood, and that of his colleagues, he said, “was increasingly of despair”.
Perhaps the biggest problem was that Starmer “is seemingly unable to give a clear coherent sense of direction for the country.”
“Voters will forgive you many of your mistakes if you can tell them where you want to take them. But he has been incapable of doing that, and none of us know whether he ever can.”
Even those members of the Cabinet who are genuine loyalists talk about him on the basis of hypothesis and guesswork. None of them seem to actually know what makes him tick or what he wants (one told me he was planning to set out his own policies more publicly in the hope that perhaps the PM would adopt them).
In that sense Starmer seems more isolated than any prime minister I’ve ever known.
A very big test for him comes on Monday, when he is expected to give a speech that will be billed as his agenda for the rest of the parliament but is in practice a plea to his MPs to give him a last chance.
I asked a minister what MPs would need to hear to be clear that he does understand their concerns, that he “gets it”.
This was the reply. “I mean god knows because I dont think he does. It’s not anything anyone else can tell him it has to come from him.”
And that, in a nutshell, is why Starmer is in so much trouble.“]
I sense, though, that the mainstream political scribblers and talking-heads still have not quite got their heads around what is happening. It is not all about Starmer-stein. Public dislike of the bastard is certainly more focussed than is dislike of the old Lab and Con parties, but what we are seeing now is rejection of the whole LibLabCon rigged political system that has been a fixed state in the UK going back certainly to 1945 and arguably to around 1900.
If you listen to the tramline minds of Andrew Marr and his type, you may think that all that Labour has to do to recover its prestige and vote is to swap one sinister clown for another, whether it be Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper, or even Angela Rayner. No. Just no.
More tweets seen
[“Remember the absolute disaster when Gordon Brown sold off 395 tonnes of Britain’s gold at the worst possible time?
He even told the market he was doing it beforehand, which made the price tank even more. Classic.
Well, gold’s gone up about 1500% since then. That same gold would be worth around £40 billion more today.
Well, Starmer’s brought him back as his Finance Envoy.
You honestly couldn’t make this shit up!“]
[“Let’s check in on Beatrice.
Beatrice is a four-year-old Light Sussex hen in the back garden of a retired widower in a Yorkshire village. She arrived three years ago with three other hens, brought by his daughter to “give him something to look after.” It worked. He talks to them. He pretends, to himself, that he doesn’t.
Beatrice has been busy this morning.
5.42am. Beatrice exits the coop first. She is always first. The other three hens, by long arrangement, wait. The arrangement was not agreed in writing. The arrangement is, by every working measure, in force.
5.51am. Beatrice locates a slug on the lower lavender. She eats the slug. The label on a supermarket egg box would describe Beatrice as “vegetarian-fed.” Beatrice has not read the label. The slug, by 5.52am, is no longer the slug.
6.18am. Beatrice eats a worm turned up by the man’s spade in the vegetable bed. The man is digging the bed because Beatrice has, by long observation, taught him that digging the bed at 6.15am produces worms, which produces hens nearby, which produces a small social arrangement that the man has come to look forward to.
7.04am. Beatrice eats a beetle. She eats it with the considered focus of a hen who knows that beetle protein is, by every measure, the highest-quality protein available to her, and that the beetles do not, on the whole, last long once identified.
8.30am. Beatrice lays an egg. The egg weighs 64 grams. It contains, by every available analysis: a complete amino acid profile, choline, lutein, zeaxanthin, B12, vitamin D, vitamin A, selenium, iodine, and cholesterol of the kind that the human body, contrary to forty years of dietary advice, regulates by itself. The egg is, by every honest nutritional measure, one of the most complete single foods on earth. The man eats it for breakfast at 8.45am.
10.00am. Beatrice eats the man’s vegetable peelings. Carrot tops. Cabbage stalk. The end of a leek. A small piece of stale bread. This is, in industrial poultry terms, an unauthorised diet. In actual hen terms, it is the diet hens evolved on for several thousand years before anyone thought to feed them only one thing.
11.30am. Beatrice kills a rat. It is the second rat she has killed this year. She does not eat the rat (rats are too large) but she does, with great commitment, prevent it from getting near the feed. Beatrice is, by quiet local agreement, the most effective pest-control system in the village.
1.15pm. Beatrice naps in a dust bath of her own construction. The dust bath has been positioned, by Beatrice, in the precise spot in the garden that gets afternoon sun for the longest. She did not ask the man’s permission. She did not need to.
3.40pm. The man, in the kitchen, calls her name.
Beatrice comes.
She does not come for the daughter. She does not come for the postman. She comes for the man.
Things Beatrice has, in one ordinary day, debunked:
That hens are vegetarian. They are not. They are obligate omnivores, and the supermarket “vegetarian-fed” label is, by every honest reading, a deficiency diet sold at premium prices.
That eggs are bad for you. Forty years of dietary advice, substantially walked back since 2015. Eggs are now, in most modern guidelines, considered one of the most nutrient-dense foods available.
That chicken farming is, by definition, cruel. Industrial poultry, in many cases, is. Beatrice’s life is not. The honest argument targets the system, not the species.
That backyard hens spread disease. The disease vector data points overwhelmingly at intensive operations. Beatrice’s three companions and the half a million UK households who keep small flocks are not the problem.
That eggs are a luxury. The man pays approximately £15 a year per hen in feed. He gets, in return, around 280 eggs, two dead rats, a worked vegetable bed, a dust bath in the right spot, and a small quiet relationship with a creature who comes when he calls.
Beatrice is, by every honest measure, the smallest unit of working agriculture in Britain.
She is also, by quiet local consensus, the reason the man still cooks a proper breakfast.
Eat the egg.
Be the hen.
Resource the backyard.“]
Our animal friends.
“Preppers” are far better off with an acre of land and a few chickens than they are with a supply of pre-packed military-surplus MREs.
Start with Kemi Badenoch.
“Slightly...”? A total loonie, as well as being, on most issues, totally wrong.
A genuine, well-funded, properly led, and ideologically-disciplined social-national party could sweep the board; and if the (((usual suspects))) were to rig the electoral system against it, it would have the people and the will to take power without elections.
Your “worse” may be our “better”…
Nick Griffin’s blog
https://nickgriffin544956.substack.com/p/so-you-think-you-can-win-an-election
More tweets
[“Rajiv Menon KC, a highly respected silk at Garden Court Chambers and a former head of chambers, is facing proceedings for contempt of court. The alleged contempt concerns a closing speech that Rajiv delivered to a jury at the Woolwich Crown Court in January 2026. The trial involved pro-Palestine activists causing criminal damage to weapons and other property at a factory in Filton, Bristol belonging to Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest arms manufacturer.
Not only is this the first time in English legal history that a barrister is being prosecuted for contempt in respect of a closing speech at a criminal trial, but the procedure being used to prosecute Rajiv is wholly novel and without historical precedent.
Until this week, any publication about Rajiv being prosecuted for contempt has been prohibited by various court orders. As a result of reporting restrictions now being lifted, Garden Court Chambers is at last able to comment publicly on this matter. We have supported Rajiv throughout the proceedings, including significant numbers of our members attending court hearings at the Royal Courts of Justice.
Rajiv is independently represented by solicitors and leading counsel who have made powerful arguments about the jurisdictional legality and procedural propriety of the contempt proceedings being brought against Rajiv. Judgment is currently awaited from the Court of Appeal (Civil Division). It is hoped that the arguments being advanced will prevail, and that the proceedings against Rajiv will be swiftly concluded without Rajiv having to stand trial. Whatever the outcome, Garden Court Chambers will continue to support Rajiv.
It is important to note that the prosecution of Rajiv for contempt has wider constitutional implications. We are extremely concerned about the chilling effect on the Bar of the state seeking to criminalise barristers for their representation of their clients. Such action is bound to undermine the confidence of the public that those charged, particularly in political and controversial cases, can receive the committed representation that they would expect to be provided.“]
Where “they” (((they))) take over or even exercise much influence in any society, no other groups or individuals have any rights or freedoms.
Global society, not just UK society, needs to cut down the massive wealth of the few. The utter banality of the Musk and Bezos type can be seen in their competition in the field of rocketry, all so that wealthy tourists will be able to tour around the Moon or beyond. As for Musk believing that Mars can be colonized, it’s just nonsense.
Ian Robert Millard 